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I wonder why there isn't any equivalent of Wine for running Mac software on Ubuntu. Thoughts?

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    This answer is far too tautological to post as an actual answer so I'll post it here: There is no Wine equivalent for running Mac software because nobody has created a Wine equivalent for running Mac software.
    – dv3500ea
    Jun 22, 2011 at 18:52
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    Ok, and you should answer that on the answer box. I didn't knew that. But anyway, thnx.
    – Jorge Pinho
    Jun 22, 2011 at 18:56
  • you can run stuff that are universe, like htop stuff that only runs in a terminal.
    – Alvar
    Jun 22, 2011 at 21:48
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    possible duplicate of Can Mac OS applications run natively?
    – RolandiXor
    Jun 23, 2011 at 2:58
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    possible duplicate of Can I run OSX applications?
    – Jorge Castro
    Jun 23, 2011 at 19:44

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The best we got was an attempt in 2007-ish called mac on linux as a virtualization tool to run Mac OS.

If there was ever a need to built a wine version for Mac (would that be called mine?) it probably would have been created by someone already. I doubt someone could not make it but I guess that

  • there is not enough software that is Mac-only to make it worth while.
  • too few Linux users care for Mac software.

Basically there seems no need for it.

1 more issue: you are not allowed to run Mac OS software legally on non Apple hardware. Someone who creates it will get sued in an instant and no one will be able to ship it with their OS.

Edit: http://opensource.apple.com/ provides the iOS and Mac OS kernels, which are licensed under free software licenses (it is legal to run on your non-Apple, since otherwise it would be non-free). Basically it is illegal to run the Mac OS itself on non-Apple hardware, but legal to run software based on Mac OS on non-Apple hardware.

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  • In contrast, there are lots of Windows-only or Windows and Mac software, and most Linux users want to use Windows software.
    – ThePiercingPrince
    Jun 20, 2012 at 7:46
  • In some fields (e.g. graphics, advertising, authors) domain experts insist that the single best tool are (only) available on Mac. So while it's probably true that most techie types (who would go ahead and build an emulator) won't care for Mac software in the same way they do for Windows (let's face it: it's mostly about the games!), there is a need.
    – Raphael
    Jan 19, 2017 at 7:20
  • "there is not enough software that is Mac-only to make it worth while", there may not be many, but some of those few are highly desirable,. Example: Sequel Pro.
    – Majid Fouladpour
    Apr 13, 2018 at 4:34
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Now, there's 'Darling':

In it's early stages, but it works.

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    and the second link is dead ;)
    – MaKaNu
    Oct 29, 2021 at 14:48
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There is a translation layer of OS X in linux:

https://www.darlinghq.org/

Unfortunately it can only run terminal programs at the moment and maybe GUI will be in the future.

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  • 2018... some news here?
    – Peter Krauss
    Oct 30, 2018 at 16:04

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